In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class-structure, with the rural landless at the bottom of the economic ladder. The authors' theoretical model suggests that removing restrictions on land markets will increase landlessness among the poor, but that there will be both gainers and losers, with uncertain impacts on aggregate poverty.

This report has the following
objectives: (i) identify the underlying constraints to
strong and sustained growth, in particular, the dynamic
circles that lock Niger in a low-growth/high poverty
equilibrium; (ii) understand the key determinants of growth
and poverty traps and the role increased foreign aid could
play to promote growth and help achieve the
MillenniumDevelopment Goals (MDGs); and (iii) help

Vietnam has experienced three sets of
direct impacts as a result of the coffee crisis: Some
regional economic shocks, socio-economic impacts in the
primary coffee-producing regions that have resulted in the
partial dismantling of services like health-care and
education; and post-crisis changes in the business
environment. This study of the Vietnamese coffee sector is
divided into seven parts. Part 1 provides an overview of the

Delivering on the Promise of Pro-Poor
Growth contributes to the debate on how to accelerate
poverty reduction by providing insights from eight countries
that have been relatively successful in delivering pro-poor
growth: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, India, Indonesia,
Tunisia, Uganda, and Vietnam. It integrates growth analytics
with the microanalysis of household data to determine how
country policies and conditions interact to reduce poverty

This paper addresses the deceptively simple question: What is the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? It argues that rurality is a gradient, not a dichotomy, and nominates two dimensions to that gradient: population density and remoteness from large metropolitan areas. It uses geographically referenced population data (from the Gridded Population of the World, version 3) to tabulate the distribution of populations in Latin America and in individual countries by population density and by remoteness.

The overall objective of the
Comprehensive Assessment of the Agricultural Sector (CAAS)
is to provide an evidence base to enable appropriate
strategic policy responses by the Government of Liberia
(GoL) and its development partners in order to maximize the
contribution of the agriculture sector to the
Government's overarching policy objectives. Given the
strong relationship between growth in agricultural

Microfinance supports mainly informal
activities that often have a low return and low market
demand. It may therefore be hypothesized that the aggregate
poverty impact of microfinance is modest or even
nonexistent. If true, the poverty impact of microfinance
observed at the participant level represents either income
redistribution or short run income generation from the
microfinance intervention. This article examines the effects

The authors use a Ricardian model to
test the relationship between annual net revenues and
climate across Israeli farms. They find that it is important
to include the amount of irrigation water available to each
farm in order to measure the response of farms to climate.
With irrigation water omitted, the model predicts that
climate change is strictly beneficial. But with water
included, the model predicts that only modest climate

Communities supported by World Bank
rural development projects often cite support for the
development of income-generating activities (IGAs) as a
critical need. This note identifies some of the core
problems encountered by Bank task teams that attempt to
respond to this need, outlines the issues involved, and
offers suggestions on some of the points that should be kept
in mind when designing grant programs for this purpose.

In considering the contribution that Rural Local Institutions (RLIs) can make to Sustainable Livelihoods (SLs), authors bring together two important concerns that emerged among development practitioners in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. RLIs are important for addressing and mitigating factors of insecurity and instability, dealing in particular with various aspects of vulnerability. RLIs can also support participation (voice), conflict mitigation (peace), and external linkage (market expansion).

Productivity in Belarus'
agricultural sector has improved considerably, but large
parts of crop and livestock production are not
internationally competitive. The state's regulatory and
fiscal support system for agriculture has been instrumental
in improving the sector's performance. But the massive
distortions to agricultural incentives it creates to prevent
the sector from reaching its full potential. And the high

In view of its increasing importance,
and the dearth of information on return migration and its
impacts on source households, this study uses data from the
2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study survey and
assesses the impact of past migration experience of Albanian
households on non-farm business ownership through
instrumental variables regression techniques. Moreover,
considering the differences in earning potentials and